Monday, October 4, 2010

Tom Brokaw Gives The Greatest Generation an STD

Wasn't Guatemala One of the Beaches at Normandy?

Greatest Generation just rolled off the tongue, didn't it Tom? You just had to go and play myth-maker, and make preposterously hyperbolic statements like, "the Greatest Generation that any society has ever produced" who "fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the right thing to do." Unlike the thirty million men who died in WWI for the chance to be Europe's Next Top Model? But seriously, why couldn't you treat them like real people instead of a Madison Avenue slogan? People who lived in a contentious, complex era whose motivations were equally complex. Some were great, some were good, and some purposefully infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in the 1940s. Whoa, wait, what was that last thing? Now we have questions. That doesn't sound all Greatest Generation-y, Tom. That sounds more like the experiments Mengele was running at Auschwitz.

Do the revelations of what was done in Guatemala define that generation, or mean they were Nazi-esque? No, of course not. We're not that cavalier. It doesn't define them anymore than Tuskegee, Guadalcanal, Omaha Beach or Jim Crow define them. No one thing defines a generation, and no three word definition describes millions of people. That's the problem with constructing overly simplistic narratives and trying to shoehorn an entire generation into it. How would you like if someone concocted an overly simplistic, three word definition for your profession like "the lamestream media"? How you're all biased, East Coast, liberal elitists and then interpret your every action through that prism? Yeah...